The city with the greenest reputation in the country just helped the U.S. Supreme Court undermine the Clean Water Act.
For more than fifty years, this bedrock environmental law has been the primary tool to keep our waters safe for drinking, fishing, and swimming. But San Francisco fouled them up.
The intent of the Clean Water Act was clear from the beginning. It created a system to hold corporations and cities accountable for their polluted discharges. And the law was enacted for good reason. Before this protection was adopted, rivers caught on fire, waterways were clogged with dead fish, and San Francisco Bay was a dumping ground for trash and raw sewage (pictured, above).
The Clean Water Act helped turn it all around.
But now, the city’s recent Supreme Court challenge against the EPA gave the conservative wing of the court an opening to reframe the law from how clean must our waters be, to how much can polluters pollute?
To dodge responsibility for discharging billions of gallons of raw sewage into the Pacific from its Oceanside treatment plant, the city argued that the EPA can’t ask a regulated party—the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (or SFPUC) in this case—to stop polluting.
Instead, the city argued that the EPA must tell SFPUC exactly how much it can pollute, or not regulate it at all. To no one’s surprise, national mining, petroleum, and chemical lobbying associations, which have long pushed for deregulation, sided with the city in the lawsuit.
The SFPUC is wreaking havoc on the environment in a host of ways. It dumps nearly two billion gallons of raw sewage and urban runoff into the Bay each year. This pollution directly affects the people who live or recreate on the Bay’s waters. And it is a leading contributor to the underlying cause of the kinds of algae blooms we’ve seen recently in the Bay that have killed hundreds of thousands of fish.
The agency also lobbies to send massive amounts of the Bay’s fresh water to industrial agricultural operations, jeopardizing the Bay’s salmon population and other endangered fish. It also woefully lags its agency counterparts in L.A. in terms of water recycling and conservation planning.
Last year, President Biden’s EPA, California’s Attorney General, and Baykeeper sued the SFPUC to stop it from harming the Bay.
But rather than do the right thing and upgrade its stormwater and sewage system so it doesn’t pollute, SFPUC is finding ways to weaken the laws and keep polluting. Nobody wins in this scenario: Not the Bay, not the wildlife, not the people who use the Bay for recreation, and definitely not San Francisco residents.
Mayor Lurie is new to the job, and it’s important to let him know how the SFPUC’s actions have tarnished the City by the Bay’s green veneer. Let’s hope he can help restore its reputation—because we all deserve a fishable, swimmable Bay.
Want to do something meaningful to help? Sign our petition today asking Mayor Lurie to get the SFPUC back on track to protect the Bay.